Problems with 2nd NVME drive

I am building a new system to dual boot, I have installed both operating systems on different drives, Linux on one of the NVME drives and Windows ver 1909 on a SATA SSD.

IN BIOS/UEFI I always see both NVME drives but when logging into Windows it sometimes sees both drives and sometimes only one of them. It always sees the NVME mounted in the M1 slot which is the SSD that contains the Linux operating system. The drive it sometimes sees is formatted to NTFS and has been initialised and allocated a drive letter.

My question is why does this 2nd NVME drive sometimes appear in Disk Management and Windows Explorer and at other times not appear? The drive never appears in one and not the other, it's either in both or neither.

Equipment:
MB MSI MEG X570 Ace
NVME 2 x 2GB Sabrent
SSD 120GB Sandisk
Graphics MSI GTX 1080

shag00 said:

I am building a new system to dual boot, I have installed both operating systems on different drives, Linux on one of the NVME drives and Windows ver 1909 on a SATA SSD.

It always sees the NVME mounted in the M1 slot which is the SSD that contains the Linux operating system.

Your post is a bit confusing. You mention an NVMe drive in the M1 slot. You mention a SATA SSD drive. But no mention of where the second NVMe is located or what data it holds?

That said, not experienced with dual booting, Linux, or AMD boards so I can't provide an adequate answer there, but I will ask if you insured the second NVMe drive is fully seated in the slot? I once had an erratic NVMe drive issue that turned out to be a seating problem. Reseating the drive solved the issue.

Just a thought.

Apologies, the NVME that is always found is in the M1 slot, the problematical NVME is in the M2 slot.

I believe it is fully seated because initially I wanted to rule out a failed drive so I swapped the drives between ports and took extra care when re installing.

Ok, just wanted to rule that out before things went further. And thanks for clearing up the location of the second NVMe drive.

I'll move on as again, no experience with Linux, dual boot, or AMD boards.

Peace:)

You have answered your own question. Windows cannot handle having both a SSD and NVME in the same bus. The NVME on m1 takes the place of that SATA port.

bro67 said:

You have answered your own question. Windows cannot handle having both a SSD and NVME in the same bus. The NVME on m1 takes the place of that SATA port.

Your post doesn't provide any documented evidence to support your claim.

Anyway if the M.2 slot (in which the NVMe drive would fit in) occupies the same bus lane as the SATA port, that port will be disabled. However, there's nothing from preventing you from using another SATA port NOT sharing the same bus lane with an NVMe M.2 port. I've both NVMe (two) and SATA drives running in my system without issue. My OS boots from one of my NVMe (M.2) drives. And to see which lanes gets disabled depending on M.2 port used refer to the owners manual which should have a matrix chart such as this from my Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Xtreme



Note my board 3 M.2 slots and by me using the M2A and M2P m.2 slots I lose no SATA ports, but do lose a PCIEx4 port. Bottom line is it depends on the board and bus lane configuration as to what gets disabled where when an m.2 slot is used. Also be aware that not ALL SATA ports will get disable when using a M.2 NVMe drive, so it is very possible to use both NVMe and SATA drives at the same time.

sygnus21,

thank you for your quality reply. To add to my earlier post I am using a Ryzen 3700X CPU on the X570 board. The are only 4 SATA ports on this board and 3 M2 slots. My understanding is this new combination has brought with it a number of changes to the familiar PCIe/SATA/M2 architecture/relationship. Of note is my understanding that all SATA and M2 slots can be occupied with this CPU/MB combination, which is mainly made possible by the introduction of PCIe4.

My MB manual has no tables like the ones you posted, rather the tables show PCIe lane allocation resulting from M2 usage. The lane allocation is split between the M2 slots and the PCIe slots. No SATA slots appear to ever be disabled.

After much fiddling with the BIOS I think I may have stumbled on to a solution as I can consistently get all drives to show up in Windows, which was the problem and Linux. I say this after a few dozen reboots and less than 24 hours, so the jury is still out. I have currently populated all 4 SATA ports and 2 of the 3 M2 ports. I look forward to more BIOS updates for this chipset as there appear to be a few problems being experienced with with it.

Thanks for updating us. And glad to hear you can run both NVMe and SATA drives without losing any SATA ports.

Anyway as I said, I'm an Intel board user so I couldn't definitively say how things work on AMD boards, but I do understand basic hardware and owner's manuals

Hopefully things stabilize for your. Let us know if you need any further help.

Peace